Norway gets pretty dark and cold at this time of year, but back in the spring Pieces of Juno prepared this video for “Silence in Secrets.”
Lifted from the excellent Euthmyia album, “Silence in Secrets” is a floating, gentle track that showcases Juno Jensen’s ethereal vocals.
The video assembles clips from the first lockdown, and serves to remind us that another change of season is coming. Can’t wait.
The Norwegian composer and performer, Juno Jensen, has released her new Pieces of Juno album, Metanoia. It is an outstanding and creative conclusion to her “coloured wig” trilogy.
Metanoia (the green one) follows Kalopsia (the red one) and Tacenda (the blue one), and continues to explore the space between jazz and experimental music where Tuxedomoon, Cult With No Name, I Am Snow Angel and Tori Amos sometimes tread.
Named for the Greek term for changing one’s mind, Metanoia is a showcase for the elegance of Jensen’s songwriting and vocalisation.
The album opens with the question, “Is this a dream?” The ethereal piano behind Jensen’s voice on “Fortuna” draws you into into an endless space where everything is vapour, so perhaps it is.
The wash of the sea enters the frame on “Ocean Floor,” with Jensen’s emeraldine vocals dancing like blades of kombu on waves of reverb. On this album, she has collaborated again with Freddie Holm, who brought in the multi-instrumentalist Bebe Risenfors to add wind and brass to the sonic palette.
“Strawberry” and “Bluebell” have Jensen singing with a purr that will trigger the ASMR sensitive listener. Her style could be lifted from a cocktail lounge at the edge of imagination, combining an intensity of purpose and breadth of expression that is unique in our playlist.
The vapour clears a little on “Each Moment” with a story about a stranger met on a train. Jensen calls the Pieces of Juno style “Northern Noir,” and there is a black and white, shot on film, bleakness to the material. Outside the piano lounge where Juno sings in her wig, wolves prowl forests full of growth and decay. When you finish your drink, you will enter that world, too.
This is felt most of all on “Blood Love,” which closes the album with a declaration that combines the tangible and intangible. This might be a dream, but it is one that you can touch. Be careful with it.
Featured photo by Cecilia Riis Kjeldsen.
Strawberry season in Norway comes in June, ends too early, and yields the sweetest of fruit. “Strawberry” is, therefore, also an appropriate title for the latest song from Pieces of Juno.
Ripe with passionate lyrics and dripping with juicy piano lines, “Strawberry” arrives in time for midsummer. Dreamy and exquisite, it is music for fields of wildflowers.
(Photo: Sara Angelica Spilling)
Norway’s Pieces of Juno – whom we have described rightly as one of Norway’s best young artists – has revealed the first track from her forthcoming new album.
“Ocean Floor” inhabits the space that Tuxedomoon once occupied: the room where jazz and experimental pop intertwine.
Surfacing with piano and scraped strings, the song has tangles of sax and a crust of percussion. Juno’s vocals lap gently against the rhythm along with crests of reverb.
It practically smells of the sea.
(Photo: Sara Angelica)
The Curse of 2016 took a lot of artists from us. The year opened with Lemmy’s passing fresh in everyone’s minds, and the roll call of musicians claimed by the Grim Reaper kicked off from there: David Bowie, Prince and Vanity, Leonard Cohen, Pierre Boulez, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, Gisela May, Craig Gill (Inspiral Carpets), Pete Burns, Caroline Crawley, James Woolley (Nine Inch Nails), Alan Vega (Suicide), Steven Young (M/A/R/R/S and Colourbox) and Richard Lyons (Negativland) all shuffled off this mortal coil. We’ve often said at Cold War Night Life that we need to show appreciation to artists while they are still with us, as you never know when the window to do it will close, and Death did its part to reinforce the warning.
Those who survived 2016 were confronted with the spectre of a Trump presidency and the consequences of the Brexit decision. It was as if Pinky and The Brain had finally succeeded, setting up 2017 to be the United Nations International Year of Incompetence. There will be dark times; but, as Brecht once noted, there will also be singing about the dark times. We will be there to critique the critiques. In the meantime, here are our sixteen picks for 2016.
Norway’s Pieces of Juno went darker than usual for her year-closing single, “Your Mouth Is a Dragon.” The KOSO protagonist has impressed us with sets of more experimental material in the past, so it was a bit of a surprise to hear her exploring a traditional song structure with seductive, haunting guitar licks fit for a Tarantino movie. This is territory that John Fryer and Barry Adamson have explored previously, but Juno’s approach is feminine, subversive and underpinned by exotic rhythms that lift the material from smoke-filled nightclubs into a world of dreams.
As I Am Snow Angel, Julie Kathryn issues the kind of quirky and angelic pop that sometimes belies its more serious lyrical content. “Losing Face” sounds jazzy and jaunty, on one level, and the accompanying video of Kathryn spinning on a pole might pass for a sensual presentation designed for VH1, but when the singer laments being left feeling “dirty and incomplete” there is more going on. Sugar-sweet on the surface, “Losing Face” is deeper, more complex and richer than your usual music television fare.
Zanias is the latest project from Alison Lewis, the mind-expanding, psychedelics-ingesting chanteuse of Berlin’s underground. The video for “Through This Collapse” is a stark, futuristic performance of the song, showing Lewis in a Vantablack dress surrounded by particles as fine as her voice. The song is tension itself: with needle-sharp vocals and a vein-scraping, bit-crushed instrumental track, it will play as intensely in caverns as it does in clubs.
As the half of Psyche who handled the keyboards, Stephen Huss was a legend of Canadian alternative music. His spiky hair and hook-laden synth lines were instantly recognisable, and Psyche’s style became the template for a dozen imitators.
Huss withdrew from active participation in the band after illness made it impractical to continue, but in the background he didn’t stop recording original material. After his untimely death last year, brother and Psyche vocalist Darrin collected many of Stephen’s solo instrumental recordings and put them out for appreciative fans. Notes of a Lifetime is both a reminder of Stephen’s talent and the love that held Psyche together. The inclusion of a joint Huss brothers recording makes it even more poignant.
John von Ahlen’s Parralox project is as prolific as it is impressive. At the end of 2016, Parralox released two full albums: Subculture and a collection of covers, Holiday ’16. Subculture shows off von Ahlen’s growing list of celebrity connections, featuring vocal contributions from Marcella Detroit (Shakespears Sister) and bass work by Ian Burden (Human League), while Holiday ’16 re-interprets classic tracks by Pet Shop Boys, Cicero, Depeche Mode and Human League.
You don’t have to choose between the two, as Parralox’s label, Conzoom, offer a package deal, but the place we would take you first is von Ahlen’s take on Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumours.” It is positively fizzing with energy, turning a rather mournful piece about teen suicide into an energetic, acid-fueled dance track with a more positive vibe.
Sarah Badr’s FRKTL project matured in 2016 with a proper second album. The first release from the Anglo-Egyptian digital pioneer was Atom, back in 2011: an electro-acoustic marvel that stretched sounds beyond recognition. Qualia, named for the psychological and philosophical categories of qualities that are always experienced but hard to explain, went further and incorporated Badr’s voice and world rhythms suitable for the dance club into mixes that were both exotic and intriguing.
We recently caught up with Badr to learn more about her approach, and our interview with the globe-hopping multi-instrumentalist will be coming out shortly. In the meantime, we can’t recommend Qualia strongly enough.
There are signs that Covenant, the Swedish darkwave legends, are slowly, collectively, morphing into Brian Eno. It’s certainly hard to avoid that conclusion when a feature of their new album is the sound of the sea and engines being focused by a parabolic sound mirror; particularly as they were attracted to it as a sonic and historical metaphor for Europe’s response to the Mediterranean refugee crisis. The Blinding Dark puts some of the experimentation that was reserved for the bonus disc on Leaving Babylon in the foreground, even as it showcases the band’s continuing deftness with energetic rhythms.
John Fryer’s Black Needle Noise is really the reincarnation of This Mortal Coil, his most famous studio project. Fryer’s prolific writing and recording make it hard to keep pace with the new tracks that issue from his current base in Oslo, but there were two very exceptional songs beamed out by BNN this year: “Warning Sign” with Kendra Frost and “Heaven” with the dreampop cult figure, Jennie Vee.
“Warning Sign” was a revelation for listeners more attuned to Frost’s work with Kite Base (see number 3 in our list, below). It also featured the kind of spatial depth that has long been a signature of Fryer’s production style. Although it clocks in at 4’35”, the single seems to flash by and require a constant replay. Proof of progress: in the old days, you would have to return the needle to the groove by hand.
With “Heaven,” we got to hear Vee at her darkest, intoning a mantra for an unhappy state of mind. Vee’s voice is one of the most distinctive in modern pop, but with Fryer behind the controls it emerges with new textures that reveal painfully sensitive moments.
Nash the Slash is sorely missed. A true Canadian original, he is known outside of his home and native land mainly for his early work with Gary Numan and an album produced by Steve Hillage. However, Nash was also a composer of soundtracks to surrealist films (“Un Chien Andolou”) and – so we argue – the inventor of the sounds that became signatures for The Orb and System 7.
A bold claim? Just listen to “Blind Windows” from Bedside Companion and try to make a counterargument. We’d go even further and point out that there are sounds in “Blind Windows” that can be found in Wamdue Project’s “King of My Castle.”
Thanks to Artoffact, both Dreams and Nightmares and Bedside Companion were re-released in 2016. We have it on good authority that 2017 will see a reissue of And You Thought You Were Normal, which will be an even bigger reminder of how big an influence Nash was on electronic music.
Are we allowed to blow our own trumpet? Well, we’re going to, because the Heresy compilation blew many minds in 2016. A tribute to Rational Youth, it gathers no less than nineteen artists, including the Canadian electro-pioneers and two former members of the band, into three vinyl platters. There is a CD bundled into the package, but no downloads. There is no way not to touch the vinyl in order to play the material. You can almost hear Super Hans saying: “No downloads.”
Did we mention that it makes an excellent present? And that it can be ordered from Storming the Base, who also handle Psyche and Nash the Slash products, should you know a vinyl junkie who needs that final hit? We did? Then you are sorted.
Speaking of Rational Youth, they made 2016 better with a new album up their sheer black sleeves, in the form of Future Past Tense. The first studio album from RY since To the Goddess Electricity, it proved that the Canadian pioneers have lost none of their sense of melody or political angst. The lead single, “This Side of the Border,” is influenced by Canadian nationalism, social democracy, nostalgia and The Who – a heady cocktail made more potent by the addition of Gaenor Howe’s vocals.
We caught up with RY on their European tour to support the album, and it was striking how much enthusiasm there was for the new material. Crowds in Sweden and Germany happily sang along to the new tracks with the same confidence and affection as the hits from 1982’s Cold War Night Life. They didn’t always give Tracy Howe his microphone back, but that’s another story.
It is hard to believe that Vile Electrodes are only on their second studio album. Britain’s best synth band stunned with The Future Through a Lens, which established a benchmark for the island’s electronic scene with tracks like “Proximity” and “Nothing.” Now that the island has decided to sink into the Atlantic, rather than accept European influences, the Viles are setting the bar again in a less pop-oriented vein.
In the Shadows of Monuments sounds like an industrial title, and singer Anais Neon certainly channeled more Cosey than Debbie on the interim EP track, “Love Song for a Pylon,” but discogs.com thinks that the band is going in a “synthwave” style. It isn’t. From the opening, eponymous track, Shadows is part 4:00 am and part 4AD: dark, moody and sleep-deprived. You can dance to “The Red Bead,” but you’ll want to get the headphones back on for “As Gravity Ends.”
There is not a spot of magenta or cyan to be seen, nor a sample from the Tron soundtrack to be heard. This is not “synthwave” but dark ambient and experimental material of the highest standard.
Hannah Peel shifted gears half-way through her latest album, moving from delicate pop into more industrial sounds, layers and loops. The arc of the album mirrored the dementia that eventually claimed her grandmother, and many of the songs are both raw and unnerving for anyone who has lived through a similar experience. It turns out that many people have, as Awake But Always Dreaming received substantial attention and acted as the focal point for an Alzheimers-related culture event in Shoreditch to general acclaim.
It was Peel’s performance of the new material at the Troika! show that led us to include her in our Live Act of the Year selection. It might have a serious motive, but the songs of Awake But Always Dreaming work best when you can feel the rhythms and see the hair flicks up close.
We first saw Kite Base warming up for Hannah Peel in deepest, darkest hipster territory. First impressions were very promising with dueling bass guitars, natty electronics and Kendra Frost’s vocals forging an original and deep sound. Bandmate Ayşe Hassan also plays in Savages, so you’d expect them to be loud, but Kite Base has subtlety as well as rhythm.
This year, we finally got a 7″ single to spin, and it turned out that the duo were just as good in the studio as on stage. “Dadum” has the kind of hook that sticks in your ear for days on end, while the accompanying video highlights the band’s interest in origami. It’s on the flip side, however, that the promise of Kite Base really starts to kick off with Frost’s voice opening up over bass lines that throb like the veins of a long-distance runner.
Along with Hannah Peel and I Speak Machine, Kite Base were our joint choice of Live Act of the Year for their Troika! show at London’s Shacklewell Arms. The rumble outside would have been only a partial clue to the intensity of their performance, which has been crafted through shows in Europe and America alongside Savages. The sonic fractals really fly when Kite Base are plugged into their DI boxes, and they expand and shift with a deft psychedelic touch that is anchored by the tautest of bass lines.
Eddie Bengtsson has promised a new Page album in 2017. Until then, we have the band’s midsummer single, “Är det jag som är en idiot” (EN: “Is it Me Who Is an Idiot?”), to keep us company through the Nordic winter. Produced and mixed by Richard Flow of Machinista, this is Page’s only official release since 2013’s “Som ett skal” (EN: “Like a Shell”), and it’s a tease that it was accompanied by only one B-side. We know what’s coming next, and we can’t wait.
Pole position for 2016 didn’t go to an obvious choice with a hipster following on Facebook. Eric Random has come and gone from the music scene over the years, but is most closely associated with Cabaret Voltaire and its Doublevision label. Random’s return in 2016 with Words Made Flesh kept some of the indie-industrial vibe from his earlier recordings, but was notable for repositioning dance music as something with character and texture. With influences drawn from world music, Random breathed new life into electronica, as this stand-out track demonstrates.
If 2013 was the year of new music and 2014 the year of the live show, what was the defining feature of 2015? We’d say that it was the development of collectives organising to support artists outside of the record industry mainstream. The trend picked up steam with I Am Snow Angel joining forces with Dani Mari and Claire London. They called themselves Female Frequency and started crowdfunding to produce an album made entirely by women artists. Over in Norway, the KOSO collective launched with a similar spirit. This was less of a feminist statement than a reflection of feminine confidence. The record industry might be run by men in suits and their hipster-bearded minions, and EDM might have been born in some boys’ bedrooms, but this year the female of the species got tired of waiting for her turn. She sounds great.
We called What It’s All About the soundtrack to summer, and with its effervescent synths and sparkling vocals it was glittery bliss for the trip to the beach on bright weekends. Those days are long forgotten in Europe, suffering in the cold and damp of a stormy December, but we have Polaroids to remind us that Train to Spain’s first album was an accomplished debut.
Hannah Peel’s first EP of cover songs, Rebox, tackled classic 80s pop gems, like “Tainted Love” and “Blue Monday.” Her second, Rebox 2, picked tracks from more current artists, such as East India Youth (with whom she toured) and Perfume Genius. We love Peel’s original material, but there is no faulting her song choices or interpretations here. As ever, Peel’s voice is the draw – it travels on wavelengths of exceptional clarity and has the impact of a Holi carnival of colours.
Machinista’s second album showed off the continued strength of their songwriting, as well as John Lindqwister’s penetrating vocals. Last year’s debut, Xenoglossy, set the template, and there was clearly more Lynchian, dancefloor-friendly poptronica waiting to come out.
John Fryer, the legendary producer and songwriter, pushed out two major projects in 2015: Silver Ghost Shimmer, a grinding, sexy project with singer Pinky Turzo; and Muricidae, a Mortal Coil-esque enterprise featuring Louise Fraser. We found it hard to choose between them, but in the end kept coming back to this jewel from Muricidae’s debut album, Tales from a Silent Ocean. Set to repeat, it’s perpetually Sunday after sundown, and that’s our favourite time.
Reinterpreting a Depeche Mode album with synthesizers might seem a neat conceit from a distance, but when it is A Broken Frame, the Basildon boys’ second, purely electronic album, you might also ask, “Why?” The answer is that Depeche Mode have long turned their back on that masterful set of experimental pop. If Gore and Gahan aren’t going to develop the ideas that were first captured in Blackwing Studios, back in 1982, then why not some fans from Athens who have a line in angelic electropop? By giving the songs a modern makeover, Marsheaux breathed new life into them – if only DM would do the same!
There still isn’t a band in Britain that is making music at the level of Vile Electrodes. Their three-track EP, Captive in Symmetry, reminded everyone of that, but so did a show warming up for Mesh and a headline performance at “A Secret Wish.” This was also the year that the BBC discovered the Viles, as did lecturers in media studies at an academic event in Dusseldorf. After years of breaking the fourth wall, surely it’s time they punched through the glass ceiling, as well!
In the year of A-Ha’s return, we discovered a Norwegian artist we like better: Pieces of Juno, an Oslo-based songstress, caught our attention with leftfield poptronica and creative video work. We first heard her providing backing vocals for Karin Park at Electronic Summer, which was a mighty performance all-round, and a little digging unearthed a vein of gold and silver.
Nothing against Morten & Co., but things have moved on a little. These days, Juno and friends in the KOSO collective are making their own way without the support of major record labels. As this effort shows, Norwegians are still doing great video work to accompany the sounds from the North.
One of the stand-out performances of 2015 came from Sweden’s Me the Tiger at Gothenburg’s legendary Electronic summer event. The trio from Falun shook the walls with outstanding songs and fabulous vocals from Gabriella Åström. It turned out that they’d put it all down in the studio, too, and Vitriolic was bottled lightning. With DAF’s management behind them, they’re going to go far.
The word “muse” comes up a lot in writing about New York’s Jennie Vee. Not in the sense of a glam- and prog-influenced rock band that puts marching teddy bears in their anti-NWO videos, but as an artist who stimulates others. Courtney Love has used the term to describe Vee, as has her photographer, Katrin Albert. We just call her great, because Vee has given shoegaze a shiny, patent-leather kick from behind. Her first solo album, Spying, demonstrated that the preceding EPs weren’t kidding with their emphatic, bass-driven dreampop. We’ll be spinning this for a long time yet.
The arrival of Karin Park’s fifth studio album was keenly anticipated. There had been a three year interlude since Highwire Poetry, and it turned out that the extended gestation period did nothing to detract from Park’s sense of melody. With a diverse group of songwriters collaborating on compositions, the album’s flavours change like an American gobstopper candy: layers peel away to reveal a raw, inner core of emotional authenticity that you get from few other artists. “Hard Liquor Man” and “Look What You’ve Done” will become classics of Park’s live show, but we also loved “Stick to the Lie,” which had a single release with this remix.
Dan Söderqvist’s sidelines from Twice a Man have included a number of collaborations with European and American artists. This year, he picked through the archives for some of the best, which were collected as Dark Flowers Awake. With contributions by the artists behind Building Castles Made of Matchsticks, Narcoleptica and Mono-Drone, among others, the album showcased Söderqvist’s experimental forays but also how far his influence reaches beyond Sweden’s borders.
We’ve been waiting for Rein to come along – a fierce, independent woman who combines talent with a capacity for attitude and aggression that can tame the hardest death metal grunt. Armed with a copy of Reason, Rein stormed onto Soundcloud with the old-school EBM of “There Is No Authority But Yourself,” followed quickly by “Concrete Jungle.” The latter proved that she has a fantastic voice, while this mix pushed us out onto the floor all over again. Dance, pilgrim!
Finnish avant-folk composer, Lau Nau, breezed into our consciousness with the soundtrack to Hem. Nagonstans, a film by Lotta Petronella. Readers of The Wire and visitors to obscure festivals will have got there ahead of us, but the musical world of Laura Naukkarinen is one that we are happy to inhabit. A rare London appearance confirmed the organic beauty of Lau Nau’s voice and vision. We’ve been walking barefoot among the birch trees ever since.
Released to mark SMPJ’s first London show, at Cold War Night Life’s “A Secret Wish,” …translate was an ultra-limited edition EP, featuring English versions of some of the band’s best-known songs. With a darker version of “Stadens alla ljus” rendered as “All the City Lights” and the classic “Luft” reprised as “Air,” this was the perfect introduction to Sweden’s best-loved poptronica outfit.
The EP isn’t available as a download – you had to be there. Sorry if you couldn’t make the show, but singer/songwriter Eddie B did share this taster on his Soundcloud account.
Twice a Man have been making music together for four decades, but they’ve never lost their bleeding-edge coolness. In 2015, they released a new album, Presence, with the political verve and musical mastery to show the new generation how it is done. This is a remix that appeared on the single for “Black,” proving that there is plenty of juice in the engine yet.
Gothenburg’s Electronic Summer event is the highlight of the music calendar in Northern Europe. The annual festival, which began in 2012, lines up international acts and local synthpop heroes for two days of dynamic performances and non-stop ecstatic dancing.
This year’s programme was headlined by futurepoppers VNV Nation and dark electro veterans Project Pitchfork, but shows by Marsheaux and Karin Park balanced proceedings with world-class melodic poptronica. Home-grown acts, like Me the Tiger, Presence of Mind and Destin Fragil, drew large and supportive crowds. With a regular rhythm throughout the weekend, DJs from the scene’s most influential clubs emerged from a sea of black-clad Vikings to share mixes before returning to immerse themselves in successive waves of EBM and poptronica. The forecast for Sweden’s second city had been for thundershowers, but the electricity in the air all came from a Tesla coil of expectations that was charged by the crowds gathered at the Brewhouse venue.
Sweden’s electronic music scene has held steady, over the years, against encroachments by EDM, Dubstep and Jungle. The country certainly produces world-famous DJs (Avicci, Andreas Tilliander) and pop producers (Max Martin), but it also nurtures classic synthpop acts and opens its arms to new ones. Visiting artists are welcomed with curiosity, while competing DJs and promoters from across the country are shown hospitality rather than hostility. The only aggro on display is a stylistic offshoot of industrial dance music, and the festival atmosphere is inclusive and celebratory.
Cold War Night Life participated in this year’s festival by conducting pre-event interviews with artists and performing a DJ set that included the world premiere of a new Rational Youth track. We also had writers and photographers on the scene. Our selected festival highlights are set out below, but also look for a review by our friends at The Electricity Club, who travelled to Gothenburg to find out what it is that makes the Swedish scene so special.
There was a buzz building about Me the Tiger well before Electronic Summer. In pre-event interviews, several artists cited the Falun-based band as one they wanted to check out for themselves, and it was a promising sign that they share DAF’s management. The soaring sounds blasting through the speaker stacks at the event validated the chatter about the indietronica three-piece: Me the Tiger easily bear comparison to Crystal Castles or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Fronted by the charismatic and confident vocalist, Gabriella Åström, Me the Tiger rock the room with power chords and synth lines kicked out by Tobias Andersson, while drummer Jonas Martinsson hammers out solidly danceable rhythms. Their set opens with “Pocket Sized Edition Ending” and “Ariana,” two energetic tracks lifted from their first, self-titled album. They are followed by “What Promises Are Worth,” the uncompromising first single from their new album, Vitriolic (Repo). It’s been a crowd favourite in their live show for a couple of years, and its slow build into an anthemic stormer gets even the jaded aggrotech warriors in the back to move their feet.
After “Headlines,” Me the Tiger completely smash it with “As We Really Are,” the stand-out track from Vitriolic. With a little push from Herr Sprick, expect this song to crash its way up the indie charts. It’s testimony to Andersson’s exceptional songwriting skills, but Åström’s nitro-fuelled delivery is also one of the highlights of the festival. They return to “All We Had” to close the set, basking in the after-glow and leaving the audience needing more.
Vitriolic is released on RepoRecords on 4 September 2015.
Official Web site: methetiger.com
Newly married and fresh from a honeymoon tour of North America with Norwegian noise merchants Årabrot, Karin Park‘s appearance at Electronic Summer is cause for excitement. It’s her first major show in Sweden since a mini-tour for the release of her fifth studio album, Apocalypse Pop, way back in March, and the crowd has missed her.
The act is named for Karin, but she’s not alone. At the back of the stage, brother David Park, clad in his usual Slayer t-shirt, knocks out rhythms and strikes MIDI triggers. On his right, the most recent addition to the team, Kine Sandbæk Jensen (Pieces of Juno), works the keyboards and provides striking backing vocals. The performance is breezily powerful; taut with a touch of wildness. It feels like someone’s been working to refine the stage show, and in doing so they’ve expanded its possibilities while relieving some of the pressure on the Park siblings – not that they work any less hard, it must be said.
The set begins with “Restless” from Park’s previous album, Highwire Poetry, before reaching back to 2009 for “Ashes.” A cover of “Everything” by Maya Jane Coles, which Park sang on in 2013, is a side-trip into deep house territory; a reminder that Park’s own material often hovers between Beatport playlists and dark poptronica. “Stick to the Lie” from the new album, Apocalypse Pop, is a test of Park’s vocal range, which she passes emphatically.
“New Era” from Highwire Poetry follows, and it’s hard to think of another current performer who invests so much genuine emotion into her songs. “Hard Liquor Man” and “Look What You’ve Done” from Apocalypse Pop raise the pressure – the former seeming to invite references to Vladimir Putin with a slight change to “Hard Little Man,” if we heard it right. “Can’t Stop Now” from Ashes to Gold is escstatic poptronica, and “Thousand Loaded Guns” from Highwire provides a thunderous conclusion.
Karin Park’s performance is primal in all the right places, and as shiny as Brigitte Helm’s robot from Metropolis in others. It bears noting that the new album features writing contributions from Jim Eliot, who co-wrote most of Ellie Goulding’s Halcyon album and has provided songs for Olly Murs, Will Young, Ladyhawke and Kylie Minogue. Other contributors to Apocalypse Pop include Dan Brown, who has worked with Massive Attack, The The and Mark Stewart, and Dave McCracken, who is responsible for much of Ian Brown’s solo output and has recorded with Depeche Mode. The songwriting team behind Park is talented, but standing in front of a thousand Swedes it is her voice that makes hearts pause. It is her face that makes the lenses turn in sync. It is her pain that cuts through the air. And it is her smile that rises with the house lights, as if to say, “We made it.”
Psyche arrive at Electronic Summer to mark the thirtieth anniversary of their influential first album, Insomnia Theatre. Tragically, shortly before the festival, news emerged of the death of one of the band’s founders, keyboardist and composer Stephen Huss. Although Huss had been prevented by health issues from performing with the band for many years, he had left a legacy of pioneering dark wave songs, and the shows quickly become a celebration of Psyche’s roots. Singer Darrin Huss and keyboardist Stefan Rabura have reworked a number of early tracks and added additional classics to their sets, which gives their performances an air of both respect and renewal.
The godfathers of dark wave, Psyche were one of Canada’s original synth acts. Inspired by the pantomime and politics of Fad Gadget, as well as the gothic influences of the UK post-punk scene, they sang about the consequences of teenage experimentation (“The Brain Collapses”), made suits from shaving foam and wrote soundtracks for imaginary horror films (“Eating Violins”). By the time they escaped Edmonton and started recording Insomnia Theatre, early keyboardist Dwayne Goettel had departed, leaving the Huss brothers as a duo.
Insomnia Theatre was the first step in a path that took Psyche to Europe, where their darker style was embraced by the alternative music scene. New Rose, a French label, licensed the album and released two more, which showed off the band’s ability to command the dancefloor. “Unveiling the Secret,” “Thundershowers,” “The Saint Became a Lush” and “Eternal” rapidly became electro classics and Psyche’s roots in the European scene grew deeper. More recordings followed, with labels and line-ups changing as business and personal circumstances moved on, and Stephen Huss’ retirement left brother Darrin to carry on the Psyche tradition.
The first of two Psyche shows at Electronic Summer draws on older material, starting with “Unbreakable” from 2001’s “Sanctuary” EP. “The Brain Collapses” rouses the crowd to sing along, a sea of hands reaching out towards Huss and Rabura. A series of other tracks written with Stephen Huss follow, including “The Saint Became a Lush,” “Eternal,” “Angel Lies Sleeping,” “Uncivilized” and “The Outsider.” Darrin Huss’ voice has the strength of a male Shirley Bassey, and he uses it to full effect on a set that ends with “Unveiling the Secret” and “Gods and Monsters.”
A secret show, held at the outdoor stage named after Psyche’s “The Outsider,” follows on the second day of the festival. An enthusiastic crowd, still buoyant from the previous day’s proceedings, cheers on “The Crawler,” “Mr. Eyeball Ooze,” “Krieg” (a track written by the Huss brothers with Dwayne Goettel in the band’s early days), “Thundershowers,” “Taking Chances” and “Insatiable.” The Swedish audience show their appreciation for the Psyche songbook by packing the stage area and singing along to even the lesser-known tracks. It’s all over too quickly, but it’s clear that the DNA of these songs can be traced into many of the other acts performing at the festival.
Official Psyche Web site: psyche-hq.de
There was a time when Depeche Mode were adopted by left-leaning music journalists for their critical lyrics and Soviet-/Maoist-influenced graphics. That culminated with the release of Construction Time Again and the single, “Everything Counts,” in 1983, but more sensitive semioticians had already registered the symbolism of A Broken Frame the previous year. Brian Griffin’s striking cover photograph for the album showed a peasant working in a field with a sickle; Martyn Atkins’ graphics followed the theme with wheat-sheaf and sickle symbols; and Martin Gore’s lyrics for “The Sun and the Rainfall” seemed to channel the anti-Thatcher mood of UK youth with the repeated line, “Things must change!”
If the music press had high hopes for Depeche Mode’s political direction at the time of A Broken Frame, they were less impressed by their musical turn. Following the departure of Vince Clarke, who had penned most of the songs on their chart-baiting debut, Speak & Spell, the band had struggled to come up with equally commercial material. A couple of singles, “See You” and “The Meaning of Love,” rode the momentum generated by their early hits and hinted at Martin Gore’s emergence as a songwriter, but A Broken Frame was a transitional release, showing the band at its most experimental. With time, the band came to turn their back on the album, dropping even the singles from live shows. Looking back, Dave Gahan called it the band’s “weakest album by far.”
Many fans had a less harsh assessment of A Broken Frame, appreciating its off-beat but clever, purely synthesized, songs. While “Leave in Silence” was a peculiarly doom-laced song for a 12″ single, which couldn’t really be danced to comfortably, it fit with the darker musical atmosphere prevailing in 1982. Other songs, such as the instrumental “Nothing to Fear” or the moody “My Secret Garden,” were magnificent departures from the twee synthpop sounds that had dominated the charts a year earlier. The closing track, “The Sun and the Rainfall,” despite its critical-realist lyrics, was invested with as much optimism as could be wrung from a PPG Wave.
The gap between Depeche Mode’s assessment of the album and their fans’ enthusiasm has only recently been bridged by Marsheaux. The Athens-based band caused some controversy when it released a track-for-track cover of A Broken Frame on the Undo label, earlier this year. Dissenters grumbled about the potential similarity in styles, but Marsheaux’s interpretations turned out to be respectful and thoughtful. While the production of the original songs had disappointed Depeche Mode, they hadn’t revisited them. It was left to Marsheaux to deconstruct and reimagine the tracks, which they did true to the poptronica style developed over their previous four albums.
The genius of the project is revealed most fully in a live setting. Depeche Mode are never going to play “My Secret Garden” for their current audience, but fans who know the songs want to hear them played at high volume. The crowd at Electronic Summer is one of the best informed, so they know all of the tracks and have taken Marsheaux’s versions to heart. The Greeks oblige with performances of “My Secret Garden,” “The Sun and the Rainfall,” “Monument” and “Leave in Silence,” interwoven with Marsheaux originals, “Exit,” “To the End,” “Can You Stop Me?,” “Hanging On,” “Dream of a Disco,” “Breakthrough” and “Inhale.”
At the front of the stage, singers Marianthi Melitsi and Sophia Sarigiannidou manipulate microKORG keyboards and show off their vocals, while men in wolf heads work on the live mix. A video projection runs behind them, but all eyes are on Marianthi and Sophia and all ears are tuned to what Andy McCluskey of OMD called the duo’s “wispy, melancholic charm.” On “The Sun and the Rainfall,” Sophia’s breathy vocals transform the song into something more sophisticated than the original. Things must change, certainly, and sometimes they come out better for it.